Rick Spielman Should Save Face & Cut Bernard Berrian
By Jon Merckle
Bernard Berrian’s status with the Vikings is currently unknown if you’ve been following him lately on Twitter. Just the past couple of weeks he’s make us believe he’s been cut by the team by saying dumb things like he’s “bout to drive back to Fresno right now” the week of camp opening and also changing his Twitter background away from Vikings colors. But then just today he tweets how he was in Winter Park getting a playbook. Who knows what’s going on other than Bernard Berrian (bluffing one way or the other) and the Vikings front office (not publicly commenting). Perhaps we’re reading too much into Berrian’s Twitter account. But that’s what we do. We run a blog.
What is currently known now however is we lost the Sidney Rice derby. Re-signing Rice (sorry, I just can’t call him Sidney anymore) was a tough task considering we’re over the cap now and he shares the same agent as Berrian in Drew Rosenhaus. Berrian was also as a fallback option if Rice left town. There are just two problems…
1) How many players throughout the entire league are viewed as “fallback options” that are set to make $3.9 million next year and didn’t even grade out as one of the best 50 in their position last year? If you guessed more than 0, please say names.
2) And secondly, Berrian and Rice are now linked performance wise because of their contracts. Fact is we have paid out all of Berrian’s guaranteed money, yet he’s still believed to be in purple and Rice is now a Seahawk. Berrian stays and struggles, fans boo missing the ’09 version of Rice. Berrian stays and thrives, it had better be a Pro Bowl like year for fans to quickly forget the memories of Rice.
And I know Leslie Frazier said today “We’d like to have them both back” on Rice and Berrian, but the fact is this team is still over the cap and need to make some cuts. The only way Rick Spielman saves face going into the season is if he cuts Berrian (what’s to lose now by hurting Rosenhaus’s feelings) and finds another option at wide receiver that is less expensive. There are others out there that could use a fresh start.
Jon Merckle may be followed on Twitter @thevikingpig